Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
(I’m very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)
They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn’t read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
It is currently plausible (
352115%[1]23%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science[2].
Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can’t edit their text normally.
(For speed of writing, I mostly don’t cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.)
Context: I think there’s a ~17% chance that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
TLDR: I now think it’s <1% likely that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
(I now think the relevant question is rather whether orcas might be >=+4std intelligent, since that might be enough for superhuman wisdom and thinking techniques to accumulate through generations, but I think it’s only 2% probable. (Still decently likely that they are near human level smart though.))
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently “An alternative approach to superbabies” is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
Can someone please look into this?
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
Image description.
Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face.